It’s hard to point out the reasons behind that, but lately there has been a lot of mergers and acquisitions involving huge players of several different areas. Disney bought FOX, AT&T and Time Warner merged, T-Mobile and Sprint are in the process of becoming one.
Mergers and Acquisitions can have a number of effects on all parts of the pyramid. For one, it usually shakes the CEO echelon. If it’s a business acquisition, it’s likely to kick out the “weaker side” CEO so there’s no “but we do it this way” and a corporate spirit is firmly enforced. And on the employer’s side, unfortunately, more than often there are layovers. Especially when the companies merging overlap in function. If there are a lot of people doing the same thing, numbers get crunched and that means firing a lot of people. And, depending on the size of the companies merging, it can be terrible for smaller companies, who find themselves unable to compete, and leads them to look for merging with another one to keep their boat sailing. So, as you can see, mergers and acquisitions involving our industry player’s would impact the real estate industry in a big way.
With that in mind, our team at RealEstateAgent.com came up an idea. A proposal, a challenge for all of us to brainstorm what mergers and acquisitions could impact Real Estate. To make those “what if” scenarios in our head and consider how would the industry get impacted by them.
Are we saying Company X and Company Y are about to merge? Not at all! Far from it. It’s just an exercise because we believe that by putting our brains to work we always end up having good ideas for our own businesses. And when we “merge” our brains we acquire more knowledge – see what we did there?
So let us start with the “what if’s” and please comment afterward giving your own ideas so we can all tickle each other’s minds!
What if there was a business acquisition or a company merger between…
A cryptocurrency company and a Listing Website
Hey, if someone reads this and makes this happen, don’t forget to give us a percentage for the idea!
Why is it a great idea? Well, the thing with listing websites is that they only provide information about a house so that real estate agents and homeowners can research. If they want to go further, they need to contact the home seller (or its real estate agent) in the “real world”.
But imagine if Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency joined forces with one of them: everything could be done within the website. With the non-stop development of virtual reality and other technologies, the home buyer could do it all with the click of one button and buy the house as if he was shopping at Amazon. Sure, you’re thinking “buying houses is not the same as buying a Smartphone case” but some time ago we couldn’t envision someone buying clothes on the internet, and we are already buying fruit and food, so… it’s doable. If not, at least some sort of “reservation” so the seller takes the house off the market while the buyer takes a look at it with their own eyes. Self-driving cars, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain… real estate has been bombarded with possibilities from these new technologies so sooner or later someone will try to disrupt it all with and end-to-end integration in the homebuying process.
The truth is that this idea has probably not happened yet for a number of reasons. For one, there’s no cryptocurrency company strong enough to make a business acquisition. The whole idea of these cryptocurrencies is to decentralize the financial structure. Most of them are peer-to-peer transactions, so there’s no “company” behind, there’s no business to acquire or merge. What is happening is listing websites trying to create their own cryptocurrencies to make this scenario work. However, it takes a long time to develop the technology, and an even longer time to make it popular enough for the idea to be successful, so the only way of doing this somehow work would be to find a way to make a business acquisition of an existing cryptocurrency so that they’d be exclusive with that technology. So, yes, thinking about it with more detail… not that doable.
But that’s okay! Innovation is trial and error! At least this one serves to fuel the brain. Our next imaginary company merger will definitely make more sense and impact real estate!
StateFarm and Lesnar Corp.
Imagine the insurance giant StateFarm was to make a company merger with construction giant Lennar Corp… Why would that happen? Well, it makes sense because of their shared pool of clients. By merging - since both of them are pretty big and don’t exactly compete, we’d say this would be a company merger rather than a business acquisition – one could have access to the other’s mailing/contacts. And that’s no small feat. For anybody. Together, each would become more attractive and sought after in their respective (and highly competitive) markets by having the possibility of offering bundled and built-in discounts from their sister company to the clients – who, we assure, won’t complain. Everyone wins (aside from their competition, who’ll likely see them rise to new even-grander heights.
Tesla Motors and 3D Systems
Elon Musk (Tesla Motors’ owner) has mentioned he wants in on Real Estate, and – although his holding business is called “The Boring Company” – if there’s one thing he does not do is play boring. That means he wouldn’t just go about flipping houses or anything conventional. He would want to do something big and innovative. With that in mind, you can’t get more innovative in real estate than with 3D Printed Homes and there’s arguably no bigger 3D printing company than 3D systems.
This business acquisition – Musk’s companies have a lot of money, we think he could outright buy them - would definitely focus on off the grid homes because the environment is a big concern for Musk and could even benefit from Tesla’s solar panel technology. Plus the smart home devices it could have… wow, we want a Tesla house right now! Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a trifecta of Elon Musk’s companies within your home? Like, a 3D printed home powered by Tesla’s solar panels, financed via Paypal, that could travel to the moon just like Space X! Ok, we’re getting a little too crazy here…
But landing back on Earth, a business acquisition from 3D systems by Tesla Motors would make sense even if Musk didn’t want to go into Real Estate, as the 3D printing technology could cheapen (and perfect) several things within their automobile manufacturing.
In your opinion, what other mergers and acquisitions could impact Real Estate? Don’t be shy, go crazy! Sometimes is when we look at the silliest ideas that we come up with that almost-impossible idea that, if made possible, becomes a billionaire, game-changing, company! Why not give it a go?